ABSTRACT
I have tried to depict the mind as odyssey, each individual mind, possessed of its own unique consciousness, on a journey of self-discovery. If there were no such thing as the unconscious mind, consciousness, in and of itself, would be baffling. If the evolution of complex multi-cellular organisms out of primal atomic matter is somewhat understandable, though still quite astonishing to contemplate, the evolutionary leap from matter to consciousness itself has never been adequately explained. Neo-Darwinism, sophisticated as it is, cannot explain it. From an elemental periodic table to the complexity of the ribosome’s replicability, the journey from the inanimate to the animate can be conceptualized, but the biochemical, molecular steps from the animate to self-consciousness remain a mystery. The concept of an unconscious portion of the mind posits a depth psychology beneath “our official consciousness” as Freud once called it, thereby making the voyage of self-discovery all the more difficult to chart (1897). In a sense, the history of ideas could be considered a never-ending voyage of Eastern and Western philosophical and psychological thought from Lascaux to the Louvre, from Buddha to Breuer and Freud. There are probably as many odysseys as there are individual minds to make them. In his contempt for psychology, Joyce, as mentioned earlier, sneered: “Psychology! What 212can a man know but what passes through his mind” (Ellmann, 1982). And yet what passed through Homer’s mind passed through the mind of James Joyce, as both “imagined” the human condition as an evolving odyssey.
